Stay On Course

We’ve won four out of six and drew with Watford before that so that is five decent results from seven games"

Dean Saunders

Dean Saunders believes Wolves must not allow Saturday’s defeat at Bolton to knock them off their survival course ahead of another massive Molineux match-up with Huddersfield on Saturday (3pm).

Wolves (19th) and Huddersfield (21st) both sit on 48 points in the congestion at the foot of the npower Championship table, with Saunders eyeing up the chance to do some damage to the Terriers in Saturday’s game.

In doing so the team will have to return to the sort of form which saw them take 13 points from the six games prior to Saturday’s disappointing 2-0 reverse.

“Of course Bolton was a setback because we wanted to win the game,” said Saunders.

“We’ve won four out of six and drew with Watford before that so that is five decent results from seven games.

“So we have to take the positives out of it.

“That run has got us to the position we are in now and I was thinking if we could have won at Bolton and then again next week we’d have one foot in there for next season.

“But we couldn’t get going against a good team and found it hard to cope in the first 20 minutes.

“If you’d looked at the start of the season then you’d have certainly thought that Bolton away was going to be a difficult one.

“We just have to move on now and look ahead to the next game which is Huddersfield.

“We need to try and do them some damage next week by winning and in doing so stopping them getting anything as well.

“They are below us at the moment so we have got to try and keep it that way.

“They drew on Saturday and will be wanting to beat us next week but we want to get ourselves out of trouble.

“Results were kinder to us at the weekend than in previous weeks and we’re still not in the bottom three.

“We’ve got to make sure we are mentally switched on for Huddersfield now.”

Saunders meanwhile has backed Jake Cassidy to continue to make an impression despite withdrawing the striker at half time at the Reebok Stadium.

He explained: “We’d won three games on the trot and kept the same shape and I didn’t want to make too many disruptions so I just swopped Jake for Sylvan.

“He is a young player and he is having a go but it just didn’t come off for him on Saturday.

“He has got a good future in front of him but in the second half I decided to bring Tongo on.”

With so many teams involved in the survival shake-up Saunders admits there is a need to keep on eye on other results, but only after Wolves have looked after their own business.

“I asked about the other results when I came in after the game on Saturday but I’m more concerned with how we started the game and why we were missing that intensity,” he said.

“We’ve still not had a complete bad performance when we’ve been shocking and got battered but in the first few minutes here we gave ourselves too much to do.

“You can’t keep scoring three goals to win games as we had done in the previous two.”